OK, even I'm a little disappointed that my first post since the beginning of the month is just another dream thing. I really need to get back into the habit of writing up the positive (and, I suppose, negative) real life things that happen but, frankly, I'm doing more stuff elsewhere, and generally don't feel like adding to this blog at the moment.
Which is a shame, because - just for example - my girlfriend and I went to see Treasure Island at the National Theatre last weekend, and it was completely fantastic - the elaborate set was very clever and adaptable, the cast (including Arthur Darvill and Patsy Ferran, the latter having previously appeared in last year's stage production of Blythe Spirit starring Angela Lansbury). My main thought throughout was "I hadn't realised this was supposed to be funny!", as I've only ever seen movies of the story, and the only deliberately funny one seemed to be the Muppets version... though it's always possible I misremember.
But anyway.
Work has been quite fraught recently, with a certain exhibition taking up much of everyone's time over the last couple of months. I worked on the show guide, as I did last year while Temping, and things like the signage were split between all of us, despite all working to essentially the same template.
Throughout this time our manager has been exhibiting certain... aberrant - not to say abhorrent - behaviour, focussed largely on my counterpart. In an assessment meeting they had a while back, she told him he needed to stop asking so many questions and do more on own initiative... but, whenever he's followed that instruction, she's become angry and told him he should have discussed things with her first. Contradict much?
Most recently, she got he and I to 'help' her on one of her regular magazines, which had been running late due (we were told) to the editors supplying their copy late. Thing is, she's recently been complaining about being busy with freelance work, so we suspect she's not as focussed on office work as she should be when she's working from home. She asked us to handle amendments supplied by the editors, and I ended up doing most of it because my counterpart was too busy doing his own work on that magazine. I gather the editors had an argument with her after I'd departed for the day, and that she'd threatened to cry (which was described by one of the designers as "awkward"... most likely, I'd guess, because it was being put on). The next day, when my counterpart arrived in the office, he found an email from her accusing him of deleting files and thereby causing delays. Considering I'd done the majority of the work she referred to, and I'd certainly not deleted anything, this seemed unfair. He hadn't gone anywhere near that stuff, and it wasn't as if she'd veiled the accusation with a question ("did you delete any files from x folder?"), she went straight for saying "you have been deleting files". Naturally, he protested.
She then claimed that she could see - via some software sorcery - that he had deleted files (which tends to suggest to me that the files weren't deleted) and insisted that they continue the discussion 'offline' since she wasn't in the office that day.
And, of course, when he spoke to her on the phone, she sounded drunk.
I've started to think that I should do something (and I know precisely what) about this situation, because it upsets me that my counterpart is essentially being bullied... and in exactly the same way that our predecessors were bullied by this same manager. The question is how this has been allowed to continue, so I really need to ascertain what passes for HR at this company and make some enquiries.
Cut to last night, when I suddenly had a dream about all the work I did for the exhibition, which is now well behind us.
It began - if I remember correctly - with a post-mortem meeting about the show guide, which revealed it was littered with spelling errors. And not just simple ones - we're talking mistakes that were utterly obvious, and honestly looked like whoever typed it had suffered a seizure mid-flow. Naturally, my boss was apoplectic. I couldn't understand how that had happened, so I went back to the source file to check. At one point, my boss seemed to start hyperventilating, so I tried to calm her and she got even more angry. After quite a bit more that I no longer remember, I woke up, briefly... and then drifted straight back into the same dream.
As a form of reparations, my boss got me to work on a new project which appeared to be a wine label. In real life, this is darkly amusing, considering her drinking. She was quite bitchy about the work in progress, focussing on my use of standard line weights for something or other. Thankfully, I didn't go through much more of that before waking up properly.
In other news, things flat-related aren't progressing a great deal... a set of light fittings and switches were recently stolen from the communal areas, all because the front door wasn't closing properly. The landlord has dealt with the latter issue, but the former - hopefully - will get dealt with today. We shall see...
Sunday, 22 March 2015
Sunday, 1 March 2015
Not Even The First Weird Dream Of The Year
I made an unconscious decision, when I turned forty (yet somewhat flexible, as it turns out), to avoid live music concerts as, I feel, they are more for the young 'uns than for middle-aged folks like me. This goes against my own experience, and I suspect it's more that the aforementioned young 'uns are actually kind of embarrassing to be around at a concert, even if I don't know them (for example, the bunch of teenagers at a Jane's Addiction gig I went to years ago, who were confused by any song from an album prior to Strays, who were playing with matches before the concert started, and whose female contingent was quite literally falling out of her clothes). Of course, this misses the point that most of the bands I like are now made up of middle aged members... Nevertheless, I passed on the opportunity to see Queens of the Stone Age again last year, pleading financial worries, and now rather regret it... And when my girlfriend recently discovered that Weird Al Yankovic will be playing in town this year, I encouraged her to obtain tickets.
Perhaps that's why, last night, I dreamt of a Nine Inch Nails concert which seemed to have been split into two parts. One, the kiddie-friendly part, seemed to have been staged in a school assembly hall, with all the kids sitting cross-legged (and laden with all kinds of cool boxed electronic gadgets, for no easily discernible reason), patiently awaiting the start of the concert. I was with my best friend and another old friend who now lives in the States (in fact, it seems likely, going by the accents of the other folks in the dream, that the concert was happening somewhere in the States), just wandering around the hall.
The venue was well-lit and the stage unadorned with the usual lighting accoutrements of a NIN gig, but none of us were in any doubt about the headline act. While my friends and I were wandering around - possibly looking for seats - a man crawled over to one of the kids and indicated that the concert was about to start, and that everyone should be encouraged to wave their gadgets (in-box) in the air, the way some folks like to wave cigarette lighters in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert.
OK, brief digression: now that electronic cigarettes are a thing and lighters are no longer as necessary... what the hell are people going to wave in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert?
Back to the dream now...
This one kid spread the word throughout the blocks of seated kids, but my friends and I moved on before the concert started... as far as I can recall.
Moved on, it would seem, to the grown-ups NIN gig in a huge stadium nearby... Only it almost wasn't a stadium, but just a random section of a city, as I'm sure I saw public seating and shopfronts, pavements, roads and alleyways as we wandered around. In fact, thinking about it now, it kind of reminds me of the Disney venue my girlfriend and I visited last year...
Weirdly, once we'd found our seats, the first part of the concert just seemed to happen without any music being played - the lights came up, we cheered, and it was all over for the first half. I'd noticed a large number of teenagers wearing red hoodies, and put it down to them being from the same 'yoof group' or school or college, but it transpired that they were later to be part of the events on-stage, as all of them left their seats and started making their way backstage during the intermission.
My friends and I took this as an opportunity to find better seats, and so wandered off down one side of the 'stadium'. We found better seats, certainly, in that they were less crowded... but they were also far off to one side and too close to the stage to really have a good, comfortable (non-neck-craning) view of the stage. I protested on just those grounds and headed off, further back and toward the middle - close enough to our original seats, I thought - for a better view of what was likely to be another stunning NIN light show during the second half (going by the lighting rigs being moved into place on and around the stage).
In fact, when I finally took a seat, I felt pretty sure that I was back in my original seat... though the gentleman I'd sat next to (clearly not of the mind that rock concerts are for the young 'uns as he was even older than I) disagreed. He first reached into my shirt pocket, only afterward explaining that he was after my ticket, so he could clearly indicate that I was in the wrong seat. Pulling my ticket out of another pocket - firmly believing that either I had a duplicate of his ticket, or maybe he or I had come on the wrong day - I realised that he was right - his group were in seats D16 and above, while mine was clearly D9.
I got up and went in search of the correct seat just as the main lights started to go out and the lights on stage started to pulse and flicker. When I reached what I thought was seat D9, I found it occupied by a baby, wrapped in a blanket and looking rather confused. I leant over the seat back and asked the lady next to it - who appeared to be the child's mother - if there was any chance I might squeeze in (the thought having occurred to me that I really didn't want to sit on the baby), but she indicated that the row was crowded (which it was - suddenly all of them were).
And so, as the droning intro to The Great Below began, as an announcer boomed over the PA that NIN were playing the venue "for the first time in fifteen years", accompanied - in celebration of the momentous occasion - by several assembled youth choirs ("aha - that's what the colour-coded hoodies were in aid of!"), I made my way back to my friends with my tail between my legs...
...And the sinking feeling, as I passed through groups of red- or white-hoodied teenagers right in front of the stage, that I was probably intruding on a filming of the event. I'm not even sure I reached a seat, let alone the seat with my friends, as the concert started and the dream moved on to a shopping trip with my girlfriend where, walking through what appeared to be a market set up in a town square, I thought I recognised a nearby building and said "Now I know where we are!", then decided to make a detour, crossing the road to properly explore how the area we had come to connected to the nearby area (somewhere on the Bakerloo line, going by the brown London Underground sign on the station I saw) which I was already familar with...
...Only that was the moment I woke up and told my girlfriend (still half asleep, the both of us) that I'd just had a dream about being at a Nine Inch Nails concert, and decided to get up to write about it here, lest I forget some of the details.
Such as, now I think about it, as we were approaching the market in the final segment of the dream, I'm certain I saw the three presenters of Top Gear lurking in the crowds, no doubt making pithy remarks about the quaint British street market for one of their 'travelogue' shows...
And yet that wasn't the weirdest dream I've had so far this year..?
No, that honour would probably go to the one where I was being driven, along with my mother, to a family camping trip in a wooded area around a lake, sometime in Autumn going by the coverage of brown leaves on the ground. When we arrived, I found my mother wasn't sleeping after all... she was actually dead. Nevertheless, I carried her over to a deck chair by the lake and next to my father, and claimed she was still very much asleep so we could all carry on enjoying the holiday, and everyone would think that she passed away while sleeping peacefully at the lakeside, rather than in the stuffy car on the way.
But still, it was pretty weird. And the first thing I did before starting this write-up was check the dates on the two NIN live DVDs I own, to see if the last concert I went to could possibly have been fifteen years ago...
...but it wasn't. It was only about eight years ago at most.
Perhaps that's why, last night, I dreamt of a Nine Inch Nails concert which seemed to have been split into two parts. One, the kiddie-friendly part, seemed to have been staged in a school assembly hall, with all the kids sitting cross-legged (and laden with all kinds of cool boxed electronic gadgets, for no easily discernible reason), patiently awaiting the start of the concert. I was with my best friend and another old friend who now lives in the States (in fact, it seems likely, going by the accents of the other folks in the dream, that the concert was happening somewhere in the States), just wandering around the hall.
The venue was well-lit and the stage unadorned with the usual lighting accoutrements of a NIN gig, but none of us were in any doubt about the headline act. While my friends and I were wandering around - possibly looking for seats - a man crawled over to one of the kids and indicated that the concert was about to start, and that everyone should be encouraged to wave their gadgets (in-box) in the air, the way some folks like to wave cigarette lighters in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert.
OK, brief digression: now that electronic cigarettes are a thing and lighters are no longer as necessary... what the hell are people going to wave in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert?
Back to the dream now...
This one kid spread the word throughout the blocks of seated kids, but my friends and I moved on before the concert started... as far as I can recall.
Moved on, it would seem, to the grown-ups NIN gig in a huge stadium nearby... Only it almost wasn't a stadium, but just a random section of a city, as I'm sure I saw public seating and shopfronts, pavements, roads and alleyways as we wandered around. In fact, thinking about it now, it kind of reminds me of the Disney venue my girlfriend and I visited last year...
Weirdly, once we'd found our seats, the first part of the concert just seemed to happen without any music being played - the lights came up, we cheered, and it was all over for the first half. I'd noticed a large number of teenagers wearing red hoodies, and put it down to them being from the same 'yoof group' or school or college, but it transpired that they were later to be part of the events on-stage, as all of them left their seats and started making their way backstage during the intermission.
My friends and I took this as an opportunity to find better seats, and so wandered off down one side of the 'stadium'. We found better seats, certainly, in that they were less crowded... but they were also far off to one side and too close to the stage to really have a good, comfortable (non-neck-craning) view of the stage. I protested on just those grounds and headed off, further back and toward the middle - close enough to our original seats, I thought - for a better view of what was likely to be another stunning NIN light show during the second half (going by the lighting rigs being moved into place on and around the stage).
In fact, when I finally took a seat, I felt pretty sure that I was back in my original seat... though the gentleman I'd sat next to (clearly not of the mind that rock concerts are for the young 'uns as he was even older than I) disagreed. He first reached into my shirt pocket, only afterward explaining that he was after my ticket, so he could clearly indicate that I was in the wrong seat. Pulling my ticket out of another pocket - firmly believing that either I had a duplicate of his ticket, or maybe he or I had come on the wrong day - I realised that he was right - his group were in seats D16 and above, while mine was clearly D9.
I got up and went in search of the correct seat just as the main lights started to go out and the lights on stage started to pulse and flicker. When I reached what I thought was seat D9, I found it occupied by a baby, wrapped in a blanket and looking rather confused. I leant over the seat back and asked the lady next to it - who appeared to be the child's mother - if there was any chance I might squeeze in (the thought having occurred to me that I really didn't want to sit on the baby), but she indicated that the row was crowded (which it was - suddenly all of them were).
And so, as the droning intro to The Great Below began, as an announcer boomed over the PA that NIN were playing the venue "for the first time in fifteen years", accompanied - in celebration of the momentous occasion - by several assembled youth choirs ("aha - that's what the colour-coded hoodies were in aid of!"), I made my way back to my friends with my tail between my legs...
...And the sinking feeling, as I passed through groups of red- or white-hoodied teenagers right in front of the stage, that I was probably intruding on a filming of the event. I'm not even sure I reached a seat, let alone the seat with my friends, as the concert started and the dream moved on to a shopping trip with my girlfriend where, walking through what appeared to be a market set up in a town square, I thought I recognised a nearby building and said "Now I know where we are!", then decided to make a detour, crossing the road to properly explore how the area we had come to connected to the nearby area (somewhere on the Bakerloo line, going by the brown London Underground sign on the station I saw) which I was already familar with...
...Only that was the moment I woke up and told my girlfriend (still half asleep, the both of us) that I'd just had a dream about being at a Nine Inch Nails concert, and decided to get up to write about it here, lest I forget some of the details.
Such as, now I think about it, as we were approaching the market in the final segment of the dream, I'm certain I saw the three presenters of Top Gear lurking in the crowds, no doubt making pithy remarks about the quaint British street market for one of their 'travelogue' shows...
And yet that wasn't the weirdest dream I've had so far this year..?
No, that honour would probably go to the one where I was being driven, along with my mother, to a family camping trip in a wooded area around a lake, sometime in Autumn going by the coverage of brown leaves on the ground. When we arrived, I found my mother wasn't sleeping after all... she was actually dead. Nevertheless, I carried her over to a deck chair by the lake and next to my father, and claimed she was still very much asleep so we could all carry on enjoying the holiday, and everyone would think that she passed away while sleeping peacefully at the lakeside, rather than in the stuffy car on the way.
But still, it was pretty weird. And the first thing I did before starting this write-up was check the dates on the two NIN live DVDs I own, to see if the last concert I went to could possibly have been fifteen years ago...
...but it wasn't. It was only about eight years ago at most.
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